In vehicular door devices, a latch of a latch mechanism provided in a door body engages with a striker on a vehicle body side when the door body is in a closed state. The latch is connected to a release handle mechanism (an inner handle and an outer handle) of the door body through an operation transmission member, such as a cable, and releases the engagement with the striker upon operation of the release handle mechanism.
In recent years, among such door devices, a door device has been devised in which a latch release actuator, such as an electric motor, is attached to the latch, and in which the latch release actuator releases the engagement of the latch when an instruction signal is input from an opening switch, such as a touch sensor (see Japanese Patent No. 3921156 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-2085, for example).
In a door device that is employed in a rear gate such as the door device described in Japanese Patent No. 3921156, a latch engagement releasing operation and locking of the door (locking the release of the latch) can be achieved by control of the latch release actuator alone. However, in a side door of a vehicle, for example, in considering escape from the vehicle interior in case of emergency, the release handle mechanism and the latch needs to be connected to each other with a mechanical operation transmission member, such as a cable, while the latch release actuator is attached to the latch.
Accordingly, in the door device described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-2085, the release handle mechanism and the latch are connected to each other with a cable serving as the operation transmission member, and a latch release restriction device (a lock device) is provided in an operation transmission path ranging from the release handle mechanism to the latch with the cable in between, in which the latch release restriction device disables and restricts the link between the release handle mechanism and the latch that are linked through the operation transmission path. An actuator portion of the latch release restriction device is connected to an opening switch, such as a touch sensor, and when an instruction signal is input from the opening switch, the actuator portion enables the link between the release handle mechanism and the latch. With the above, the door device gets into an unlocked state that allows a releasing operation of the latch to be performed with the release handle mechanism.
After the door device described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-2085 gets into the unlocked state in the above described manner, upon subsequently receiving a pop-up operation instruction from the operator, the engagement of the latch is released with the latch release actuator and the door body is popped up. Furthermore, after getting into the unlocked state as described above, when the release handle mechanism is operated, the latch is directly operated through the cable and the engagement of the latch is released.